DAMN: Nate Silver's 538 site: Chances of winning: Clinton 51.5% - Trump 48.5%

[CajunBlazer]

Silver now shows her ahead in states with only 272 electoral votes and her lead is dwindling in swing states where she was leading by fairly comfortable margins and Trump is widening in swing states in which Hillary was previously winning

Colorado: Clinton +1.3%
Michigan: Clinton +2.3%
Pennsylvania: Clinton +2.3%

Hopefully Hillary's debate performance turns this trend around because right now it's a dead heat.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

[scheming daemons]

1. "358" is an interesting typo.... because that's how many Electoral Votes HRC will get in November.

You'll see.

[CajunBlazer]

3. I hope you're right - maybe my fingers know something I don't

I'll fix it.

[geek tragedy]

2. don't look at the NowCast.

Clinton needs a win tonight, badly.

[Barack_America]

4. Wow. Well that just fuckin sucks.

Unthinkable.

[liberal N proud]

5. This country is full of stupid fucks

[Agschmid]

9. Yup.

[adigal]

39. And racists. I know a lot of white people voting for him.

"Good" Catholics who are nevertheless bigots.

I'm beyond disgusted.

[artyteacher]

6. isnt he taking some

horse race polls a bit too seriously? Some very silly internals on some of them.

[CajunBlazer]

12. Nope - I'm afraid not

I have been checking the site at least daily since the convention when Silver had Hillary with a 89.2% and I have seen a steady downward trend in every poll since then. However, this is the most Hillary's chances of winning have fallen in a one day period. Lot's of bad poll news. over the last couple of days.

[artyteacher]

20. every?

There are recent polls where she rebounded to 6 points nationally.

And the cnn Colorado poll sounds like it has almost no minoritoes or people under e0.

[MANative]

7. His tweet this morning about trend lines has me ready to vomit.

[BlueStreak]

14. Don't blame Silver. He is just reporting what he sees.

[MANative]

16. Not blaming - just the fact that it's happening is what's sickening!

I don't tend to shoot the messenger, even if I don't like him very much.

[Kilgore]

8. RCP showing similar

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_elections_electoral_college_map.html

[helpisontheway]

10. Things are looking bad with 40-something days to

go. I want to believe Plouffe but if Trump can convince people that he is sane and won't do something crazy, he might win.

[BlueStreak]

11. Trump is all over the news every day.

Clinton campaigned very little in August, and has had zero campaign appearances in the past week.

It looks like Ohio and North Carolina have gone from solid states to long shots for Clinton.

It appears that the Clinton team has decided they are just going to place everything on the debates and the ground game.

Maybe they are right and they have this thing. But I have never in my lifetime seen such a season where the candidate simply didn't campaign much at all. I don't get it.

[helpisontheway]

18. I know...Obama campaigned like he was 20 points behind

until the last vote was counted. Maybe they have some sort of new strategy? I hope she is being 100% truthful about her health. If she is healthy then I can't understand why she is not campaigning non stop. Donald Trump will destroy this country and she is the only person that can stop him. She should be putting everything towards that goal.

[BlueStreak]

21. Energy begets energy

When people see a campaign out there fighting, they naturally have a positive reaction. People are intellectually lazy. They don't want to think about the consequences of anything. They tend to rely on what they see "the crowd" doing, and just go with that.

Each time a candidate holds a well attended rally (not some little photo op in somebody's kitchen), there is a lot of word-of-mouth. "I hear xxxx is going to be here tomorrow. Are you going?" This is powerful stuff.

It is especially powerful for Trump because he needs repetition so that his extreme radical messages start to sound normal. And it is not just with the public. He puts that repetition in front of the media that are covering him and pretty soon they stop asking questions and rolling their eyes. It all sounds normal.

It seems to me the Clinton campaign is assuming that TV ads will do a lot of the work for her. That's probably a bad assumption, given how fragmented the media consumption patterns have become. Many of us barely watch any TV these days, and you really can't cover all the channels people watch.

Another factor with these appearances (that don't seem to be happening) is that local appearances pump up the campaign volunteers. No matter how positive and upbeat a volunteer wants to be, if you look around and see the candidate is not out there, it is really hard to for volunteers to put out the effort.

Something is strange here. This is not like any campaign I have ever seen, and I have seen all of them as an adult since Nixon 1972.

[Scruffy1]

28. I think the powers that be underestimated the appeal of the demagogue.

Historically I've never seen an election like this, and I've seen them all since 1956. Trump has manged to suck all the air out of the media by just being outrageous. His name is repeated constantly. I think you are right that if a message is repeated often enough, it becomes normal. That combined with the press going along with the smear campaign for all these years against the Clintons makes it easy for the demagogue. The key here is that the vast majority vote with their gut, not their brain. The appeal of racism and white nationalism will always have a core of support fomented by politicians who blame the "other", but Trumps numbers are in excess of that. It seems at this late point it is hard to change the dialogue and even harder to steal his thunder.
The only thing I can think to compare Trump to is Huey Long. He was the one politician who scared FDR. The good side of this is that most demagogues eventually bury themselves in the dung heap they created. After all, you have to keep getting more outrageous to keep grabbing headlines, and as the pile gets higher both the novelty wears off and the structure becomes so illogical no one can follow it anymore.
We really should be getting a landslide this time around, but that's not going to happen at this late date. I think the debates could move a few voters, but not a lot. The best hope is that somehow Trump explodes are is destroyed by someone with some street smarts like the way LBJ destroyed McCarthy. So far using facts hasn't worked, but I'm not surprised by that. The voters of Wisconsin reelected McCarthy even after he was censured. Once somebody believes in something it is hard to change their mind.

[BlueStreak]

38. I think you are exactly right.

Anybody who is hoping for a big "gaffe" from Trump in the debates should stop to understand that virtually everything he says would have been considered a "gaffe" in prior elections. Trump handles this in every case by doubling down and accusing anybody who questions him as being the establishment that has ruined America.

Trump has a big advantage in that this country is really screwed up in some very fundamental ways. He has latched onto that feeling and relentlessly hammered on it, saying he is the person who will fix all these problems. Never mind the fact that it is people exactly like Trump who have caused the worst problems, and he never offers any real solutions.

It is pretty easy to make these things stick when you have the campaign trail mostly to yourself.

I have no idea what the Clinton campaign is thinking. I can only hope that they have been playing a game of keeping their powder dry until tonight, and tonight becomes the unleashing of a fierce fighting machine that is going to go all out for the next 45 days A Blitzkrieg strategy, if you will. If that is the strategy, they have been masterful at setting this up by laying low while their huge lead vaporizes.

[adigal]

40. I can't even imagine this country with a President Trump

I can't even imagine how I will feel on the day after Election Day and for the next 4 years.

I think I will move to Vermont and join their annual secession movement.

[BlueStreak]

42. The problem is that most of us are powerless to do anything about it.

I am in a state that will not be contested. I guess I could volunteer to move to Pennsylvania for 60 days to knock on doors. That isn't really an option for me.

So we are dependent on the campaign to succeed with whatever strategy they have.

And lost in all this discussion is the impact on the down-ballot races. If there is a conscious strategy to lay in the weeds until just the right moment to strike, well, this does have consequences on the other races that are being fought daily.

I have said above that I have never seen a campaign such as this. That is not entirely true. In 2004, I kept waiting for Kerry to fight back when all that Swift Boating was going on. I hoped and believed that the campaign must have had some clever strategy planned to spring on Bush. But they didn't. Some people just don't like to campaign. It is clear that Trump loves this stuff. It is what he has done every day of his life. If there is a microphone or a camera, Trump is there.

Seriously, one candidate used family power to avoid any real service, and was doped up most of the time. The other guy fought in the jungle with distinction receiving several Purple Hearts. How does anybody lose that argument?

[Democat]

23. That's what I don't understand

Where is Clinton?

[Demsrule86]

13. Wang and Nate Cohen have her above 70. nt

[CajunBlazer]

17. Have they updated their prediction recently?

[helpisontheway]

25. Not sure if they have updated the website recently. However, Wang was just on a live show

a few minutes ago and he clearly believes that Clinton will win. He did not seem concerned about the recent polls. Wish I could be as calm as Plouffe and Wang..lol Maybe I need them with me every single day telling me that everything will be okay. hahahaha

[CajunBlazer]

31. Nate Silver correctly predicted the winner in 50 out of 50 states in 2012

and 49 out of 50 in 2008. How did Wang and Plouffe do?

[Demsrule86]

43. I don't know about Wang but Cohen has. nt

[RAFisher]

24. I can't tell if he's factoring in today's polls.

I don't he has yet.

[CajunBlazer]

15. Maybe this is about people waiting until after the first debate to decide

Maybe so folks who favored Hillary last week have pulled back and are now waiting until after the debate to make up their minds.

Usually the person leading going into the first debate wins the election. Only in 1980 and 2000 was that not true. This is a dead heat.

The person leading after the first debate has always won the election - a lot is on the line tonight.

[vdogg]

19. I can't for the life of me figure out

Which state drops off in the now cast to give trump a 54.9% chance of winning.

[RAFisher]

26. I've seen the now cast do that before.

Where the race is so close that the probability favored one candidate but the map favored another. I believe it works that why because of national polls. I've seen it happen to both candidates. In July Clinton was slightly favored but only had 268 to Trump's 271.

[CanonRay]

22. I got nauseous when I saw that.

We are fucking doomed if that idiot wins the White House.

[smorkingapple]

27. I think Silver will have a real reckoning after this election.

Not only does his model move with the latest polls aka very noisy,he's not incorporating any turnout modeling into his forecasts.

It's all about the ground game and Clinton has a massive advantage there.

[CajunBlazer]

32. Well, his modeling techiques haven't changed and...

..he correctly predicted the winner in 50 out of 50 states in 2012 and 49 out of 50 in 2008. And don't forget Obama had a massive ground game as well.

What is troubling is that all of the polls show that Trump supporters are more enthusiastic to vote than Hillary's. We may need the ground game just to even things up.

[smorkingapple]

37. Yeah but Romney/MCCain were traditional candidates running traditional campaigns

plus Obama as first black president in 2008 and incumbent in 2012 were different paradigms than today

[MFM008]

41. He's infallible??

Never screws up?
He also predicted the Seahawks as a shoe in to win the superbowl 2 years ago. No problem.
What he didn't see was the worst call in HISTORY and instead of passing the ball to Lynch they threw it..intercepted. we lost.
Can't see those unexpected things.

[CajunBlazer]

46. Silver never said the Seahawks were a "shoe in" the 2015 Superbowl

Your memory is cloudy.


FiveThirtyEight uses the Elo rating, which takes in to account strength of schedules, margins of victory and more. According to this rating, Silver puts the Seahawks as slight favorites. Despite this, the Patriots are 1-point favorites in Las Vegas.

Silver wants to be clear that he’s not 100% confident in his predictions.

The Seahawks, says Silver, rank higher because of “their consistency over the past three years. Russell Wilson has never really had a game where the Seahawks have been out of contention. Their losses have been close, they’ve played a very good schedule and they don’t make a lot of mistakes.” If he had to bet at even odds, “I’d bet on the Seahawks. But if you give me a little bit of an edge on the Patriots, I’d take them instead,” he says.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-seahawks-have-an-edge-in-the-super-bowl--nate-silver-143438357.html

And he would had that little bit of an edge - going into the game Vegas had New England favored by +1.

Besides, this isn't football - it's elections where Silver really shines - in the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections he picked the winner in 49 out of 50 states and 50 out of 50 states correctly for a 99% average. And I am willing to bet he will have a very similar prediction average this year.

By way, beware of what you write, there are fact checkers on this board. Your post is rated "Mostly False"

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

44. If what he projects on the morning of November 8th happens, no one will care. n/m

[Agnosticsherbet]

29. The polls are wacked out. One day up; the next day fucked.

There aren't enough goat entrail or flying doves to read the American future.

[CajunBlazer]

33. I have been watching the polls closely and that's simply not true

There are a few divergent polls - usually ones that aren't given a lot credence - but there has been a steady trend since the convention in the national and all polls in swing states where Hillary has lost her leads and/or had them steadily reduced.

[Vinca]

30. I don't get this. I really don't.

Trump is not only unqualified, he's untrustworthy. The man is a pathological liar and a sociopath. I'm not a big fan of Hillary either, but at least I recognize the sane person out of the two candidates. I have a sick, sick feeling that Trump is going to win and the next morning, as with the Brexit vote, the dim bulbs will be saying "Oops . . . can we do it over?"

[book_worm]

34. Panic Time!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[LenaBaby61]

35. Given what's allegedly going on over @ 538....

tRump will be winning California and New York. Deep blue states.

I know what I see HERE where I live, and I know about the state I live IN. I know many here where I am in the LA County area--or the Southern part of this state. Even know a few folks up in Northern California.


Yeah, I'm gonna lay off Nate and his models from this day on and stick to what I'm doing in terms of phone banking until the end of October.

[a kennedy]

36. and did you see the Senate forecast??? NOT GOOD at all......

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/senate/?ex_cid=2016-forecast

[LAS14]

45. ?? At this point the three scores range from Clinton 53+ to Clinton 55+

[kerry-is-my-prez]

47. This country is doomed. So many stupid people........